Progress on Flint's Smith Village development crawls forward

Home construction takes place at Smith Village project in Flint in this file photo.Sean Ryan | MLive.com

FLINT, MI – Close to 30 homes inside Flint’s Smith Village development are still for sale, but emergency manager Michael Brown said the fact that the city has sold four of the homes is progress.

“That’s really good news on a project that has been up and down like a roller coaster,” Brown said during a news conference on Wednesday, July 17.

City officials said there are four other homes that are in the process of closing and seven additional houses have purchase agreements on them.

There are 36 homes in the development off of Williams Street between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Saginaw Street. Three more homes still need to be complete, Brown said.

The project is in the Fifth Ward and City Councilman Bernard Lawler said the fact that there are 20 other homes without owners is troublesome.

“That’s not a quick enough pace,” said Lawler, who attended Wednesday’s news conference. “I was hoping at least half would be sold by this time.”

At least 83 homes were supposed to be built at Smith Village by February 2013, but because of the project’s slow progress, city leaders previously told MLive-Flint Journal that only 39 homes – fewer than half of the original target – are complete.

The project is primarily funded by federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds and about $900,000 from the city’s water and sewer fund went toward infrastructure at the site, city officials previously said.

The project started in 1998 with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Development, but has stalled throughout the years.

Three different developers have worked on the project.

“I know we live in a tough economy,” Lawler said. “There are people living in the area who are qualified.”

He said there was a list of 100 people wanting to live in Smith Village, but the consistent delays forced them to move elsewhere.

“I think that the lull that we had with the project being stagnant for months – I know people who ended up moving to Grand Blanc because they couldn’t wait any longer for their dream home,” Lawler said.

The city needs to keep up with weed and trash abatement and finish demolishing vacant commercial and residential properties near the development, he said.

“People are still very much attracted to that newness – they want subdivision living right here in the city of Flint,” Lawler said.